Columns: What happened in Gloria Victis during 2015?

The year 2015 is coming close to an end. It has been a year of incredible amount of changes for the development of Gloria Victis – not only the core systems have been greatly improved but also a lot of new features have been implemented.

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Among them there are massive improvements to the overall gameplay, combat system, territory control, user experience and the in-game world. Anyway, let’s start from the most important milestones achieved over the last year of development.

The first milestone achieved this year was removing the NDA, so players were finally able to share their gameplay videos and screenshots from the game. It helped Gloria Victis to earn much more popularity and attract a massive amount of new players, in total greatly increasing the player base. The second one was upgrading the game engine to Unity 5 – in effect the graphics have been significantly improved with implementation of Global Illumination effect, reflexes on the characters and textures of higher quality, as well as reworking the SSAO and Depth of Field effects. The next great step was closing the Pre-Alpha stage finally and moving to the full Alpha stage. It has been preceded by the complete UI overhaul, doubling the size of the world and implementation of the building system with destructible objects, such as doors or walls. And the last but not least – a new gameplay trailer has been released a few weeks ago.

Now let’s say a word or two about the mentioned UI overhaul. It was a long, continuous process that over a year effected in reworking barely entire user interface. The most important is the reworked inventory system which introduced a possibility to expand the storage in the character’s inventory and depot, it has also fixed numerous issues occurring in the past. Guilds and party system has also been revamped, introducing the guild announcements, as well as the chat interface, NPC shops layout with a new buy-back tab and crafting window.

Combat is one of the core features of Gloria Victis, so of course it also has been greatly improved over the last year. For sure the most important change was the implementation of feints, allowing the players to trick their opponents by cancelling their attacks, and kicking to break the enemy’s block. Anyway, there have been numerous other improvements which greatly expanded the combat mechanics, such as variable attack power, armor penetration, headshots or the arrows trajectory being dependent on type of bow and strength of character. Moreover, now the combat system is even more skill based as the advanced players can queue their attacks, damage is being applied only to the first hit enemy and the random critical strikes have been removed. AI of the NPC enemies has also been improved, as they can block and kick as well, they also try to cooperate with each other or call for support if it’s possible and some of them can perform few chained attacks in a row if a player won’t block them successfully.

As developing the credible open world is one of the primary goals of development of Gloria Victis, it has been greatly improved in 2015. The available lands have been more than doubled, introducing a decent amounts of new conquerable locations, including few new towns, the Order of the Original Faith’s Keep, Abbey of the Lord’s Wrath and Castle Audunstede. The latter has been designed by one of the Gloria Victis’ Supporters, as well as a family of the famous mercenaries controlling this fortress for ages. There are also suburbs of Dunfen and Mereley, the main towns, new docks in Dunfen and “Dead Raven” – the very first inn implemented in Gloria Victis.